The Boston Phoenix
January 1 - 8, 1998

[Music Reviews]

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Freeformers

Previte and Berne do it their way

by Ed Hazell

Tim Berne Two journeymen in the realm of experimental jazz have recently taken matters into their own hands. Drummer Bobby Previte and saxophonist Tim Berne have each started their own record labels. Previte launched Depth of Field, with Euclid's Nightmare , a duet album with saxophonist John Zorn. Berne continues building a strong catalog for his Screwgun label with Visitation Rites, by Paraphrase, a trio featuring bassist Drew Gress and drummer Tom Rainey.

Unlike big corporations, which look for packaging concepts and aim for the widest possible audience, artist-owned labels think small and simply issue the music they like. The corporate big-money approach isn't necessarily all bad -- think of Joe Henderson's recent Verve tribute albums or Cassandra Wilson's pop-conscious Blue Note releases. But small labels risk less money, and take bigger artistic chances. Such is the case with these releases from Previte and Berne.

Previte and John Zorn are no strangers to one another, having played together in Zorn's early "game" pieces and on Voodoo (Soul Note) a marvelous tribute to hard-bop pianist Sonny Clarke. On Euclid's Nightmare, they deliberately confine themselves to improvisations that are, with a few exceptions, about one-minute long. By sticking to this self-imposed structure, they risk sounding fragmented and meaningless. But thanks to the empathy and focus they bring to the performance, the music is neither. On each untitled, numbered piece, they take a kernel of melody or a rhythm and exhaust its possibilities as fast as they can. Track 20 recalls the music of Masada, Zorn's quartet that explores Jewish music by way of Ornette Coleman. On track 10, Previte lays down the kind of groove that makes his Weather Clear, Track Fast band dance so furiously, while Zorn sings and sobs on alto. In all of these vivid, compressed, and tightly focused pieces, the boundary between rhythm and melody bends and sometimes even disappears. Zorn is explosively percussive (his improvisations have the physical impact of blows) while Previte is one of the most musical of drummers -- he can break your heart with a cymbal crash or a press roll.

To further unify the disc, the duo return to a couple of improvised themes several times. Tracks 7, 18, and 23 all take off from a sad, simple melody; tracks 5 and 14 also share a motif. Pacing is critical to the disc's overall effect. Some tracks bleed into one another so that they don't seem separate at all. But a long break between tracks 22 and 23 underlines a radical change in mood from relatively easy-going tempos and melodic improvisations to energy-drenched shrieking that ushers in the album's conclusion. Improvisers generally regard recording as simple documentation, but Previte's conscious use of the recording medium makes this album something special.

Tim Berne's Visitation Rites, recorded live on tour in Berlin last year, is performance documentation in the classic jazz mold. But that's about the only thing conventional about the album. With three tracks, each ranging between 20 and 30 minutes long, the music exists at the other extreme from Zorn and Previte's. The freedom to go to extremes is probably the main reason to operate your own label, after all.

Bassist Gress and drummer Rainey, who form two-thirds of pianist Fred Hersch's marvelous (and much more mainstream) trio, operate on an equal footing with Berne. The balance between lead and supporting voices in the ensembles shifts constantly, and the trio's openness to these changes and developments gives the music its sense of tension and drama. You can't anticipate where they will go with an idea. "Piano Justice" worms its way from an opening fragmented ensemble of alto-saxophone squiggles, strummed bass, and clattering drums through a series of duos and further trio passages of continuously mutating shapes, changing densities, and shifting velocities. The music operates through suggestion and dialogue: the group pounce on an idea and work it over, then leave it behind in pursuit of another. These are performances whose length is sustained by the musicians' intense involvement in the moment, their ability to listen closely and react quickly, and their heedless disregard for standard notions of form.

Berne has also issued two Bloodcount CDs -- Discretion and the mail-order-only Bloodcount Live in St. Louis -- bringing the number of releases by the band in the past year to a total of five. No major label in its right mind would issue that many CDs by a band, unless Keith Jarrett or a Marsalis were involved. But Berne, like Previte, has the luxury of indulging both his whims and his deepest artistic concerns.

(To order Paraphrase or other Tim Berne releases, write Screwgun Records, The Screwgun Building, 104 St. Marks Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217.)

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